Technology (Still) Hates Me!

/ SueBC

A little over year ago, I was having a run of what Fatima called “tech suck”. Happily, the hatred shown to me by my devices seemed to have died down soon after. Lulled into a false sense of security by the lack of overt attacks, I was taken by surprise when it all started happening again! The evidence for your consideration:

  • pexels-photo-280402.jpegLast month, while walking around the house watching a live webinar (at a little after 5:30 in the morning, no less!), I discovered that my newish work laptop has a battery that lasts 1 hour but takes 2 ½ hours to charge. How does that make sense? Apparently, for other people, this model has a 5-hour battery life.
  • Chop the HuggerAround the same time, I was streaming Urban and the Shed Crew through the Blenheim Films site and trying to feed it to my TV for better viewing. Was my work laptop objecting to its use as an Armitage appreciation facilitator? Apparently the HDMI port transmits video but no audio whatsoever. (It was hard enough to understand the accents without not being able to hear them at all!) Now I have to wipe all the RA photos from my hard drive so I can take the defective thing in to work to get it fixed!
  • Urban Play NowThis last weekend, I had one rare evening where the family was out (watching Avengers: Infinity War, which I decided to give a miss). Perfect opportunity, I naively thought, to borrow the (non-defective) laptop my son uses and to stream Urban and the Shed Crew for the second and final time in the 30-day rental I paid £9.99 for. Relishing the silence in the house, I logged in to my account and was informed that this was actually the final day for me to re-watch the movie! Perfect timing, or so I thought. When I clicked “Play Now”, the only option was to pay an additional £4.99 to watch it for a couple of days! (Shades of the Digital Theatre fiasco?). Good on the Blenheim people, though, that they responded fairly quickly to my request for help through their website. Within 18 hours, I had been supplied with a code to allow me to stream it again for a 72-hour period. Now, all I have to do is get that rare time on my own again!
  • Sun VisorDoes anyone else have trouble with overhead LED lights? All the new buildings use these energy-efficient lights which pierce into your eyes with blinding brightness. I work in one of these new buildings, and unfortunately for me, the LED lights in the hallways and meeting rooms provoke migraines in susceptible people like me. My friend at work bought me a (gag?) gift and thinks I should wear one of these visors to the office! Um… no.
  • P!nkMind you, P!nk seems to rock some pretty similar headgear, so maybe flip it up and add some bling… Which leads me to another thing. I had really, really wanted to go and see P!nk, but the “verified fan” system designed to foil scalpers didn’t work for me, as I shared back in October. Well, ticket sales for her tour have been so successful that a new Vancouver show in April 2019 has been added. So, once again, I signed up for the pre-sale, opened up the app and waited… and waited… and waited… Searching for TicketsAll I got was the screen at right… for hours! Sucks. I found out later that for some reason, the code they gave me works only on my computer and not on my iPhone. Of course now there are only $300++ tickets available. But hope springs eternal! A second April 2019 show has now been added and the pre-sale starts Thursday at 10 a.m. Wish me luck in outwitting the technology and scoring a couple of tickets!
  • IOS UpdateAnd finally, it seems that my technology is trying to make sure of my demise in the event of a disaster! This week, there has been testing of the new Canada-wide emergency alert system that will broadcast to “all” cell phones that use an LTE or 4G network for high-speed wireless communication. Apparently, it didn’t work at all in Quebec on Monday and was spotty in Ontario on Tuesday. But today I heard many phones in my office broadcasting the signal at 1:55 p.m. Not mine, though. Apparently, if (like me) you are too lazy to make sure that your IOS is up-to-date with the latest version, you will only survive the disaster if your colleagues take pity on you. (I’d better be nicer to them!)

User error, defective devices, fallible systems, or a conspiracy against me by my technology? Only the techno-demons know for sure!

14 thoughts on “Technology (Still) Hates Me!”

  1. “Was my work laptop objecting to its use as an Armitage appreciation facilitator?” I LOLed so hard over this line. By the way, my phone didn’t get the notification either. They said 60% of phones got it in Manitoba. It’s looking like a, well, a clusterfuck.

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    • I suppose I shouldn’t really use my work laptop for this at all, right? Oh well.

      Yeah, it looks like there were many phones that didn’t get the notification here too and they don’t seem to know why. (Although I am updating my IOS right now, assuming that was the problem.) They say, “It doesn’t seem to be any consistent thread or theme in the phones that didn’t get the alert. It wasn’t a consistent carrier or it wasn’t a phone type or a software type,” So, apparently, they just don’t know! Doesn’t give me a whole lot of confidence.

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  2. Maybe only the people who have problems talk to me about it, but no one I discussed it with got their second watch within 30 days without contacting Blenheim. I’m not confident that they understand their own tech. So I’d blame that one on them and shorten your list a bit.

    The situation with your Pink tix is high on the list of irritations in my life at the moment (see post: “Platform exhaustion”).

    Re: battery usage, if you have a Mac there’s a screen to see what’s sucking energy at any given point (Flash Viewer is a common culprit, as are Wifi browsers that scan the ether every minute to look for a wifi connection). There must be something like that on a Windows machine, too. If you have a Mac, look for a .plist that isn’t doing anything or a piece of software that’s searching for a non-existent .plist. I’ve run into this a few times; I don’t know why but they seem to get installed periodically with downloads of other things.

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    • Oh, well that’s good to know that it wasn’t just me with Blenheim! At least now I have extra time, with the 72-hour window!

      The differences between how things work on the iphone and how they work on the desktop/laptop is extremely frustrating. I find that with WordPress too. The app works very differently from the laptop browser version. And the help desk people (“Happiness Engineers”!) are two completely different groups, so you have to make sure you are asking the right questions of the right people!

      Happily, even though I had some more technical glitches, I did manage to get a couple of reasonably priced P!nk tickets for the April 6, 2019 show. I am happy… although it’s hard to be too excited for something 11 months away!

      I’ve tried to figure out what uses the laptop battery. Even when I turn on the battery saver mode, it still only lasts an hour and a half! I think I have to save all my personal stuff externally and take it in to be looked at. There should still be a warranty of sorts since it is less than a year old.

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  4. “Armitage appreciation facilitator “ so great
    made me smile all day. Did you get the Pink 2
    date show tickets after all?
    Following up on a chat I did not know there was a time deadline to view UATSC w the credit code so I may be totally sol now 😫

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    • Guylty has also coined “droolage facilitator”! Yes, I finally got Pink tickets — it’s next Spring, so hopefully after all that I don’t forget!
      Yeah, there was a 30 day period on the 9.99 order, but you never know. If you email them they may be accommodating.

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